


the road not taken

by dirgewithoutmusic



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, mostly just a sketch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 11:17:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14055798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: Jack flies to Las Vegas in the window seat, Alicia beside him and Bob across the aisle. Jack feels too big for even the width of first class seats, and he can’t imagine how his father feels with those shoulders that have held up teams and Cups and towns, but Bob is asleep beneath an Aces ball cap pulled down over his eyes.Kent naps in his childhood bedroom, which hasn’t been his since before the Q. Spare file boxes clog the corners. Posters of Gretzky and Rudy Galindo and Britney Spears gaze over his sleeping head while in the kitchen his mother opens up bottles and pours them down the sink-- a six pack of beer, a week-old half-full Chardonnay, a bottle of cheap whiskey she’d gotten as a present. Empty glass hits empty glass and shatters at the base of the recycling bin-- contained explosions. At the folding table in the kitchenette, Kent’s little sister turns up the music in her earbuds and tries to concentrate on the molar mass of carbon.What happens is this: Jack goes first in the draft, takes an Aces jersey in shaking hands, and Kent goes home to New York.





	1. Chapter 1

Jack flies to Las Vegas in the window seat, Alicia beside him and Bob across the aisle. Jack feels too big for even the width of first class seats, and he can’t imagine how his father feels with those shoulders that have held up teams and Cups and towns, but Bob is asleep beneath an Aces ball cap pulled down over his eyes.

 

Kent naps in his childhood bedroom, which hasn’t been his since before the Q. Spare file boxes clog the corners. Posters of Gretzky and Rudy Galindo and Britney Spears gaze over his sleeping head while in the kitchen his mother opens up bottles and pours them down the sink-- a six pack of beer, a week-old half-full Chardonnay, a bottle of cheap whiskey she’d gotten as a present. Empty glass hits empty glass and shatters at the base of the recycling bin-- contained explosions. At the folding table in the kitchenette, Kent’s little sister turns up the music in her earbuds and tries to concentrate on the molar mass of carbon.

 

What happened is this: Kent was drinking.

 

Kent is drinking-- and yeah, he’d popped an extra few Adderall that day, because he couldn’t keep his jitters inside his skin, and yeah the doc had said something about alcohol-- but Kent is eighteen and on top of the world. Kent is eighteen and it feels like everything is closing in around him-- the draft coming, and what if they never call his name? Jack will go first and Kent will sit there waiting, because they’ve figured out he’s just a smile in a pair of hockey skates, a flash riding Jack’s coattails--

And anyway Jack is there beside him, hand sweaty on his shot glass. Kenny is eighteen and he thinks he knows what love is. He thinks he might be dying. He thinks it might be the first day of the rest of his life. He can’t stay still-- he can’t focus-- can’t breathe-- he takes another shot.

What happens is this-- Jack finds him on the bathroom floor of Timothy White’s billet family’s house at 1:43 a.m.

Jack calls an ambulance. Jack calls Ms. Parson’s cell, but she’s on night shift at the hospital and doesn’t get the message until morning. Jack sits in the silence forever before the paramedics come. He fills the whole room with his gasping while he tries to roll Kent over to keep him from choking on vomit.

Kent’s heart stops in the ambulance, but they bring him back.

Jack goes back to his own billet house where he lays in bed, not sleeping, until morning, when his cell shakes the whole room with Ms. Parson’s returning call.

When Kent wakes up, a few days later, it’s to his mother’s face. Jack does not visit. He knows, if it had been him in that hospital bed, he’d have hated having visitors come to stare at him. He doesn’t want Kent to hate him.

What happens is this: Jack goes first in the draft, takes an Aces jersey in shaking hands, and Kent goes home to New York.

 

Jack’s still an anxious wreck, taking on too much and rolling his pill bottle over the numb fingers in his pocket. He is eighteen and he feels like he’s dying. He’s eighteen and he found his best friend blue on the bathroom floor, and he feels the truth in his bones for the first time-- he is eighteen and he could die. It would be a period and not a verb. He feels like he is dying, but feeling that way means he’s still alive, and his pill bottle is smooth under his fingers. He talks to the team medic, thinking about Kent dry-swallowing pills and grinning at him, the freckles ruddy on his skin as he takes a vodka shot, the frantic light in his eyes.

“Kent always seemed like a nice boy,” Alicia says.

“He isn’t,” Jack doesn’t say. Kent hasn’t called. Neither has Jack. They’ve both been shaking out of their skin for years, and now one of them has broke.

Kent doesn’t do rehab, just an out-patient clinic his mom drives him to on her way to her shifts at the hospital. His little sister waits for him after her high school gets out and makes him quiz her for her AP Chem tests on the bus ride back home.

Jack gets an apartment. His mother offers to help him furnish it, but he shoos them home once the team’s finished collectively swooning over Bad Bob’s over-enthusiastic handshakes. He spends a day getting lost in IKEA, staring at pre-fab rooms, wishing he was brave enough to put in the earplugs Kent had bought for him as a joke. The crowd murmurs and roars. Couches squeak under the weight of strangers and shoes hit ground and if he could just muffle it all, a little-- but he can see the headlines, hear the chirps, read the posterboard signs, flinch under the commentators’ oh no clever jokes-- Zimmerman Jr., too good for the plebians, can’t go out among the unwashed masses without stuffing his ears up so no one will speak with him--

Jack buys the first couch he doesn’t immediately hate upon sitting on it. He gets a bed, a table, and a coffee table all in something called “black-brown” because does that at least mean they’ll match? He get the first rug he touches and doesn’t hate (why are they all so terrible?) and then goes back and hesitates among the bookshelves. It’s not like he reads. But his grandparents buy him books for Christmas. Maybe he’d like it. He at least needs a place for them, right?

Kent gets his license, which he’d never bothered to before, and Kelsey, seventeen and still struggling with her permit, drags rides and favors out of him because she’s always had him wrapped around her little freckled fingers. He wasn’t very big when she was born, but he’d been big enough to hold her when the neighbor lady who’d been watching him drove him up to the hospital. “You’re the little man of the family,” she’d told him, and he’d said, “I’m not little.”

Jack has most of the furniture shipped home (home?) but he carries the bookshelf and coffee table boxes to the car. The directions folded up inside of them instruct with little cartoonish smiles to build them with a friend. Kent would have busted into them and built them alone, skipping instructions, losing details, ending up with some extra screws and a bookshelf that wobbled. Jack waits three careful days in an empty apartment, reviews the illustrated instructions to see if there really is a step that requires four hands, and decides two is enough.

Kelsey is studying for the SAT, so Kent studies with her. He was never any good at school-- bouncing off too many walls and pissing off too many teachers--but he’d gotten tutored into a GED well enough. The Adderall had helped, once they figured all of that out, toned down the breathless buzz and scattered attention that he’d thought just everyone else was better at dealing with. It’s why he’d liked Zimms so well so quickly, he’d thought, sometimes. He’d seen his hands shake and thought hey that’s my kind of dude.

The boys go drinking and Jack regrets every time he says yes. Kent had been the loud one-- the one who smiled and slapped shoulders, lost drinking games and translated for Jack, standing between him and the crowd. Kent had been quiet so rarely-- in the back of empty cars, straining to keep silent; on a bathroom floor, turning blue.

_You were supposed to be here_ , Jack texts.

_Fuck u 2 zimms_ , Kent writes back.

Kent thinks about coaching peewee, but he doesn’t want to strap on skates and gear.  He feels like jittering out of his skin every time he tries, like he’s tied down and tied in and about to implode. Instead, he gets a job at Best Buy selling computers and printers with a grin. That had always been his job-- the smiling, even if this doesn’t pay anything like the NHL would have. Kelsey recycles essays for different scholarship applications-- ones about what Color Guard has taught her about teamwork, others on why microbiology is her life’s great passion and why they should pay for that passion, a handful that begin “The day my brother came back to life...” Kent doesn’t read them. She’s better at spelling than he is, anyway, has been since she was six.

The boys go out drinking and Jack says no. He takes his untouched books off the shelf and digs up some tea his mother had left behind. He discovers the History Channel.

There are dozens of bad nights-- before big games, locked in the bathroom after a loss, long nights after bad days-- that Jack sits and turns his pill bottle over in his numb hands. He pours himself a glass of water and calls the Aces’s on-call psychologist and they sit and talk until he feels like he can breathe.

On bad nights, Kent thinks about calling up old middle school friends and seeing if they’ve grown up into parties. On bad nights he listens to Britney and watches Jack’s awkward post-game interviews. On bad nights, he counts up the cost of every piece of equipment he’s ever worn, the league fees and travel expenses. He tries to count up every late night his mother has ever spent pouring over budgets and thin red lines, but he can’t because he’d been asleep in those late dragging hours, tucked in warmly and dreaming of thin blue lines and good defense and Jack’s soft hands.

Kent watches Jack’s games on TV. He texts him “good game” and “fuckin hell, z, leave some ice 4 the rest of em” and it feels like talking to a ghost. He signs up for the SAT, and the ACT, too.

The boys go out drinking and Jack says yes, because Langston turns out to be an amateur aficionado of domestic propaganda during WWII and they’re halfway through a conversation Jack doesn’t want to end. He drinks cranberry juice in a booth in the back while Langston pulls up images, articles, and hilarious archived short films on his phone.

Kent rips open his envelope of test scores, which came in the mail beside Kelsey’s, and tells her, “Dude, your smartness rubbed off on me. Or maybe they switched our names? Is this yours?”

“You’re really dumb, sometimes, you know,” Kelsey tells him and he finds handfuls of college pamphlets shoved under his door the next day.

Kent almost starts the essay “The day I died,” but instead he writes about motel rooms across America and Canada, how they all look the same, and smell the same, and how he never got sick of them. They had given him the illusion of moving-- of progress, and change-- and he wants better than illusions now. He applies to a few dozen schools with the same skeleton of an essay.

Samwell College accepts him with a full ride scholarship-- a hockey scholarship he didn’t request, but someone recognized his name. Kent doesn’t tell anyone, even Kelsey, for three weeks. He walks the Best Buy aisles, smiling. He cashes his paychecks and balances his checkbook, leaves covered plates of dinner for his mother to microwave when she gets off shift. He thinks about strapping those pads on again, lacing up his skates, dropping down the face cage. His heart beats, a little trill of a thing, and he decides he might as well call it excitement.

Kent tells his mother. He sends in his acceptance. In the Best Buy break room, he watches every scrap of tape he can find of the Samwell Men’s Hockey team.

 

Jack and the Aces win their first Stanley Cup. Jack takes it home to Montreal for his Cup day and has to talk his parents out of trying to recreate the classic photo of him in the Cup as a baby.

Kent’s ankles are shaky, and his confidence worse, after a summer of trying to get back into top form. But his smiles have an even more professional edge and he learns the name of every team member, manager, coach, assistant coach, and janitor at Faber.

Kent meets a forward called Shitty, who doesn’t believe in pants. It’s Shitty who drags him to his first official college party, but it’s also Shitty who gets him a red Solo cup of seltzer and juice and, bug-eyed, glares down anyone who bothers him about it. Kent drifts on the edge of party and lets the noise swallow him and the bubbles hit his tongue. Shitty doesn’t notice when he leaves.

Kent almost beats Jack to being captain, and Jack, checking the SMH website before a morning run, lets himself be amused by it.

Jack gets a dog-- a beautiful golden retriever named Houston because he’s finally gone from apartment to a house with a nice yard. They go running in the morning and Houston sleeps on the brick patio in the back, while Jack’s at practice. He pays Langston’s kids, down the street, to walk and feed him while they’re at away games.

Ransom and Holster meet--and name each other--on the first day of practice that next year. Kent slaps their shoulders, memorizes their names (nicknames and otherwise) and their ecstatic grins, and thinks to himself: no, it was never like that; not even at our best, we weren't that.

Kent watches Ransom’s hands shake, and pulls him aside with an offer to talk, if he wants to, ever. He lets Holster introduce him to 30 Rock. He skirts the edge of parties with his cup of seltzer and he smiles as good as the best of them-- no, better.

And then this little freshmen bounces onto the team with potholders full of pies and Beyonce blaring tinnily out of his loose earbuds. He can’t stay on task for even the length of a Haus tour. His hands don’t stop moving and he flashes a smile even when he’s sad, when he’s mean, when he’s scared. Kent plucks him off the ice in practice when his knees go weak, and he watches the frustrated, prideful jerk of Bitty’s narrow shoulders. Kent sock-slides into his kitchen dance parties and steals pieces of pie baked at irresponsible, anxious, friendly midnights. Bitty’s hands don’t ever stop moving, and Kent thinks, with a low slow quiver of surprise: hey that’s my kind of dude.

"Dude," Kent says, as captain-ly as he can, "you are not the only pint-sized hockey player on this team, okay?" 

"Who are you calling pint-sized, Mr. Parson?"

"Would you prefer Itty-Bitty? Okay, fine, that glower could put out someone’s eye, I just-- I’ve been where you are. Checking sucks when you’re half their size. But you can give as good as you get, I promise."

Kent does not make Bitty get up at four in the morning for checking practice. Kent drags him out at midnight and fills Faber up with Britney and Beyonce and they shake their hockey butts between spurts of slamming each other into the boards.

They @ each other on Twitter in the same line at Annie’s. Kent pesters Bitty into taking a business class with him-- “For when you open that bakery, dude.” Bitty goes home to New York with him on a long weekend and learns the Parson family pumpkin pie recipe. He and Kelsey start up a Snapchat thread devoted to unflattering snaps of Kent.

 

Kent Parson is Bitty’s best friend. Jack Zimmerman, Stanley Cup champion, shows up at Epikegster. He has a baseball cap, unmarked, pulled down over his eyes. Bitty doesn’t ask for a selfie, because the poor soul doesn’t look like he’d enjoy it. He points Jack toward the kitchen instead, where the pounding music is a little muffled, and pours him some milk and hands him a brownie. “Unmedicated,” he promises and then, feeling his heart ache quietly for this un-surefooted boy and his serious gaze, watches Jack decide to believe him.

Hours later, when Jack bursts out of Kent’s room, Kent’s got his ball cap crushed in his hands. Kent looks angry and heartbroken and hurt and Bitty decides right there and then that he hates Jack Zimmerman. But Jack hesitates, looking down on him in the hallway, still so weirdly unsure off the ice. They’ve been watching Aces games in the Haus living room whenever Kent can wrest away the remote from Holster.

“Thanks for the brownies. They were-- good.”

Bitty gives Jack the coldest “bless your heart” he can muster and goes to give Kent a hug.

 

What happened is this:

Jack says, “You were supposed to be there.”

And Kent says, “Fuck you, too, Zimms. I was dying.”

 

What happened was this: Jack found his best friend blue on the bathroom floor. Kent put himself there. A sport that didn’t believe in weakness put them both there, on cold wet tile, breathless.

It could have been Jack-- but in this world, it was Kent. If it had been Jack, he would have pushed everything away, after, and found himself somewhere in that echoing peace. But it was Kent, so Jack just let him go, and Kent slept through the sound of glass shattering on glass.

 

What happened was this: these two boys taught each other how best to be cruel. Jack is rigid and jealous; anxious and untrusting. Kent is all smile; Kent is all teeth and he knows where Jack’s jugulars are. Four years gone and they still can hamstring no one else like they can lay each other low.

 

What happened was this: they were dying once, and they aren’t now. They were each other’s only lifeboat in a thick summer storm, all muggy air and screaming gales. Kent rode in on Jack’s coattails; he stood between him and the crowd. Jack poured everything he had into what he did-- playing hockey; building IKEA furniture; living up to his father’s broad shoulders; staying after to practice passing drills with Kent at sixteen, drifting in his shadow, pressing close in the back seats of empty cars.

 

What happens is this: Kent doesn’t say he misses him. Neither does Jack. Love was only ever true for one of them, anyway, and it isn’t true now. The bass of the party’s music beats through the floorboards. Kent has two midterms and a mock business proposal due on Monday and Jack has a hotel room to get back to.

Jack says, “You’re wasted here,” and he means it like a compliment, a kindness, an overture.

Kent says, “You always say that,” and he doesn’t mean it kindly at all.

 

They don’t make it to the Frozen Four, but their party after the loss makes the Swallow. There are a dozen ugly pies because Kent crammed the whole team into the kitchen to pound out their frustrations with some store-bought dough and canned fruit. Bitty is too appalled to participate in this travesty, but does kindly agree to DJ.

A box shows up on the doorstep the next day, full of some fancy-schmancy brownies and a brusque note reading _Sorry_. Kent’s not sure if it’s for the loss or for the fight, but he eats brownies for dinner and tells Bitty, “Itty-Bitty, I think you made an impression.”

“Oh, shut up.” Bits lifts his tiny upturned nose with a sniff of noble disgust and Kent grins at him. “He made you _cry_.”

“I don’t hate him, you know.”

Bitty gives him a sideways glance over the drying rack to where Kent is elbow deep in suds and steaming water. “No?”

“Much too pretty to hate, don’t you think?”

“Oh,” and Bitty’s eyes are almost as big as his pie tins now. Cheery pop beats fill the rest of the kitchen and cover up Shitty and Holster in the TV room. “Are you-- were you-- I mean, Holster and Ransom say--”

“We kinda fell apart. As, like, people. I’m just saying-- I understand the appeal of, you know, those _ass_ ets.”

“Kent _Parson_!”

“Fine, we can talk about his _eyes_ , if you want to be _romantic_ \-- or his slapshot-- I’m just saying, if you wanted his number, I think I’ve still got it.”

 

On his last day at Samwell, Kent wakes up to the smell of pancakes and a message on his cell from the Aces general manager. He wonders about Jack’s coattails, still, after all these years. He turns off his phone and heads down into the music pouring out of the kitchen and into the waking Haus.

Kent thinks about his mother’s late nights. He thinks about Kelsey’s scholarship application essays, carefully drafted, the way they said his name. He thinks about the way Jack used to stand at the edges of parties, the shake of his hands hidden in his pockets, and he thinks about how much he used to love the ice. He thinks about Britney and Beyonce ricocheting off the tall windows of Faber, his shot singing onto Bitty’s tape from clean across the rink. He feels the little trill in his heart, and he thinks it’s probably love, still.

He ruffles Shitty’s shorn hair at the graduation. He tunes out of the speeches and watches the birds. When he crosses the stage, he can see all of Samwell spread out behind the crowd-- Faber’s rising roof, the science building he knows Annie’s is hiding behind, the library. He wants, maybe, to think about ice in the middle of a desert, of dreams put away and the phone silent in his pocket, but he also wants so badly to keep thinking about this-- these four years and everything they have made him. He can see his team in the audience. He can see Kelsey on her feet beside their mother, waving wildly and cheering her heart out.

When Kent pours out of the crowd and to his mother’s side, she's smiling so much she hardly looks tired at all. When Kent thinks, on that last day, in those last hours, about things unsaid and unrealized, the shots not taken, he doesn’t have to rush away to anywhere. Bitty is right there, hanging onto Kelsey’s arm, and Kent wraps them both up in the biggest hug known to man. “I love you guys,” he says.

“Ugh, gross,” says Kelsey, smiling. “Now show me this frat den you’ve been inhabiting.”

Kent returns the call. He speaks to every scout or general manager that will speak to him, pouring over contracts at his mother’s little foldout kitchen table. Bitty spends the first few weeks of summer with them, hitting up thrift shops with Kelsey and teaching Kent simple jumps at the local ice rink where he first learned to skate. If Kent recognizes the square jaw and blue eyes that show up in Instagram stories, now and then, on Bitty’s ever-present phone-- well, he only chirps him a little.

In the end, he signs with the Aces. He’s always liked the idea of Vegas.


	2. Attachment 1: Supplemental Essay - Kelsey Parson

“The day my brother came back to life was also the day he died. 

The day my brother died I had a big history test, so my mother didn’t tell me until almost sixteen hours after his heart had stopped and been restarted. Adderall, a common ADHD medicine, makes alcohol ineffective as an intoxicant and a depressant. So people on Adderall will drink and not get drunk, and so they will keep drinking themselves all the way to severe alcohol poisoning and even death. It would be easy here to say that a combination of Adderall and alcohol can kill people, and it wouldn’t be unfactual. But as Tim O’Brien writes in  _ The Things They Carried _ , true stories are about expressing experience, not fact. 

A true story takes a stranger and puts them in your shoes so they can feel what it is like to have every carefully memorized chemical property, historical date, and part of speech wiped from your mind when your hyperactive big brother walks through the front door so pale and slow that you can see what he looked like dead. A true story fills your whole mind with the image of that, with the imagined empty seat at your graduation and at holiday dinners for the rest of your life. It reminds you of how he always let you open his birthday presents for him, and it sucks all the air from your living chest like maybe you can hand that breath over to him. A true story ruins your sleep for weeks. 

It does not matter that what color marker I used to ink in the white spaces on my shoes, but it does matter that I did it in the parking lot waiting for Kent to finish at the outpatient therapy that’s helping him with his addiction and impulsivity issues. Maybe my mother wasn’t still in her scrubs when she guided me toward the kitchen table, but it is important to tell you she was so that you will understand. My mother sat me down at our fold-out kitchen table and twisted her hands in her nurse’s scrubs and she told me Kent had gotten sick and that he was coming home. It matters that he was scared and that he had no one there to watch his back. 

Adderall and alcohol is a true story. A teenager away from home, careless and irresponsible, is a true story. But it’s not the story I want to tell you. My brother left home a bright-eyed kid, full of potential, and I am sitting on the cusp of the rest of my life. I am growing up amid a culture of perfectionism, endless extracurriculars, and intensive testing. My teachers and coaches have gifted me with a high quality education and the groundwork to stand up to academic expectations that sometimes seem impossible, but the most important lesson I’ve ever learned came from my big brother’s worst moment. 

I could tell you a story here about a 4.3 GPA student, a co-captain of the Color Guard, and a vice president of our school’s GSA. I could tell you a story about the youngest child of a single mother-- the shifts penciled into the calendar, the dinners I have heated up myself, and the singular grit, determination, and compassion I have watched my mother pour into every aspect of her life. But I want to tell you a story about my brother, who set out to achieve his brightest ambitions and came home empty-handed and pale. I want to tell you how Kent got up the next morning, and ate breakfast, and smiled at our mom to show her he was okay. He got a job at a local store. He drives me to my Color Guard practice and he’s studying with me to take on the SAT. 

Next fall, I will go off to a university and continue learning, but I will carry that with me. The day my brother came back to life was also the day he died. The day my brother died was also the day he came back to life. It is a gift, the time we have. Our worst fears and failures are inexorably tied up with the best we can achieve and to ignore the flaws and the pitfalls is to blind ourselves to the rocky terrain at our feet. 

I am a child, writing you, looking out onto a future that I want to be both bright and kind. The idea of pursuing my education in the field of biochemistry fills me with honest joy. The mechanisms that define and support that thin line between life and death, creation and destruction, delight me and humble me. What they whisper are the truest stories we have. I step forward toward the next stage of my life carrying the things my brother has taught me: that I am loved; that there will be moments in my life that scare me, hurt me, and hinder me; and that, when I fall, I can get back up and keep going. 

I think it will be a good journey, and a worthwhile one. Thank you for your consideration.”


End file.
